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Jennifer Lopez struts onto the main stage of a cavernous strip club in “Hustlers” to the blaring tune of Fiona Apple’s late ‘90s anthem “Criminal”—the first line of which, “I’ve been a bad, bad girl,” suggests the knowing, playful tease to come.

Lusty men in musty suits immediately begin throwing money at her legendary derriere—not Lopez’s, exactly, but that of the veteran exotic dancer she portrays, the impeccably preserved Ramona. Still, it’s hard to discern completely between Lopez the superstar and the larger-than-life character she plays in “Hustlers,” and that’s actually part of the pleasure of watching this career-best performance from the multi-talented multi-hyphenate. We know this figure—we know the swagger, the magnetism, the incandescent ability to work an audience—and yet, Lopez has repurposed and repackaged all her well-honed abilities here as a reminder that before she was known as J.Lo, she was a naturally gifted actress.

Seeing Lopez’s best screen work since her early heyday of “ Selena ” and “ Out of Sight ” isn’t the only reason to check out writer/director Lorene Scafaria ’s crime drama, but it’s a huge draw. In telling the true story of a group of strippers who lured, drugged and fleeced their wealthy Wall Street clients out of millions, “Hustlers” as a whole is a blast, stomping and striding with the confidence of Lopez’s thrilling introduction.

Scafaria leans a bit too heavily into classic Scorsese filmmaking tactics: the matter-of-fact narration describing the scam, her use of slow motion and zooms to heighten the emotion of a moment, the pop, rock and R&B soundtrack ranging from Janet Jackson and Britney Spears to Bob Seger and The Four Seasons, with Chopin sprinkled throughout. (Her long, opening tracking shot—from a dressing room, through a hallway, onto the stage, down the stairs and out into the crowd—does provide an impressive, immersive entrée to this realm.) And perhaps we get one or two montages too many of the high-end shopping and lavish lifestyle these ladies enjoyed with their ill-gotten gains. It’s “ Goodfellas ” in a G-string. But Scafaria’s film is always a blast to watch, resulting in a surprising level of emotional depth.

Based closely on Jessica Pressler’s New York magazine article (with Julia Stiles serving as the journalist’s stand-in), “Hustlers” follows Constance Wu ’s shy “new girl,” who goes by the stage name Destiny: a Queens native and child of immigrants navigating the world of Costco-sized strip clubs in The Big City. She’s doing it for financial survival to support the grandmother who raised her (Wai Ching Ho) and she doesn’t show much enthusiasm or talent for this pursuit at first. But seeing Ramona command the stage makes her realize how powerful—and lucrative—such work can be. The sequence in which Ramona and another stripper (Cardi B, a proud, Latina product of the Bronx like Jenny from the Block making her charismatic film debut) teach Destiny the finer points of pole spinning and lap dancing is hilarious and actually kind of sweet, and it’s an early indicator of the way these ladies look out for each other.

The money is good for a while, especially with Ramona and Destiny working together as a seductive duo in the champagne room. But then the 2008 recession hits—and it hits the Wall Street jerks hard, which means they have less cash to toss at people’s posteriors. The crazy, addictive energy of the film’s beginning eventually gives way to a more low-key tone as work dries up, the dancers go their separate ways and Destiny gives birth to a baby girl.

But desperation also inspires Ramona’s scheme to go after even bigger money: concocting a potent mix of MDMA and ketamine, sprinkling just a dash in the drink of an unsuspecting mark at a bar and then dragging him back to the strip club to drain his credit cards. (The drug-cooking sequence in the kitchen of Ramona’s minimalist Upper East Side apartment is lively and humorous but it also provides another unshakable “Goodfellas” comparison.) Ramona and Destiny recruit a couple of trusted fellow dancers— Keke Palmer ’s Mercedes and Lili Reinhart ’s Annabelle, who add to the cast’s chemistry—to create a diverse lineup of sirens, and the nightly heists kick into high gear.

Scafaria doesn’t seem terribly interested in examining the morality of the women’s crimes. She suggests that these guys have it coming to them by virtue of their chosen profession; they’re crooks and scam artists themselves, albeit of the white-collar variety. They’re also obnoxious, awful human beings for the most part, which seems to justify the women’s actions, as well. Rather, we’re meant to root for these hard-working ladies to bask in the glory of their much-deserved riches. It may seem shallow, but Scafaria makes a persuasive argument in amassing such a likable ensemble.

Ramona is, of course, the powerhouse driving the action; she’s both the brash ringleader and the warm mother hen, and Lopez fully embodies all her character’s contradictions and complexities. (Early on, during a chilly nighttime smoke break on the strip club rooftop, Ramona invites Destiny to climb inside her fur even before they’ve introduced themselves to each other. Who could possibly say no?) As Destiny, meanwhile, Wu gets to demonstrate more of an arc, transforming herself from wide-eyed neophyte to ruthless perpetrator. She also gets to show even more dramatic depth than her star-making performance in “ Crazy Rich Asians ” suggested. The teary-eyed bond between these two characters—their protective sisterhood in a world full of predators—feels unexpectedly substantive by the end, given the flashy, duplicitous nature of their dealings.

And walking out of “Hustlers,” you may experience a sensation similar to that of the strippers’ victims: You may not remember everything that happened, but you’ll know you had a great time.

Christy Lemire

Christy Lemire is a longtime film critic who has written for RogerEbert.com since 2013. Before that, she was the film critic for The Associated Press for nearly 15 years and co-hosted the public television series "Ebert Presents At the Movies" opposite Ignatiy Vishnevetsky, with Roger Ebert serving as managing editor. Read her answers to our Movie Love Questionnaire here .

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Film credits.

Hustlers (2019)

107 minutes

Constance Wu as Destiny

Jennifer Lopez as Ramona

Julia Stiles as Elizabeth

Keke Palmer as Mercedes

Lili Reinhart as Annabelle

Lizzo as Liz

Cardi B as Diamond

• Lorene Scafaria

Director of Photography

• Todd Banhazl
• Kayla Emter

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‘Hustlers’ Review: Ripping Off the Suits

Jennifer Lopez and Constance Wu star in the real-life story of New York strippers going after more than one-dollar tips.

• Share full article

By A.O. Scott

“Hustlers,” a semisweet, half-flat cocktail of exposed flesh, fuzzy feminism and high-spirited criminality, overflows with of-the-moment pop-cultural signifiers — Cardi B makes an appearance, and Lizzo does, too — but it also strikes a note of nostalgia for the recent past. Specifically the movie, written and directed by Lorene Scafaria (“The Meddler,” “Seeking a Friend for the End of the World”), looks back fondly at 2007. Back then, before the financial crisis interrupted the fun, Wall Street guys were making a lot of money, a decent amount of which found its way into the hands and under the G-strings of New York strippers.

As the movie tells it, the high point of this era — remembered as “the last great night” by one of the participants — arrives when the R&B idol Usher (playing himself) rolls into the club where the main characters work, sending dollar bills raining down on the delighted dancers. The scene is a slow-motion bacchanal, a tableau of pure glamour and delight, a snapshot of carnal-capitalist utopia. It softens some of the struggle and sleaze that we’ve already witnessed, and justifies the entrepreneurial larceny to come.

Our guide through the highs and lows of this world is Destiny (Constance Wu), who is telling the story of her career to a journalist. (“Hustlers” is based on a New York Magazine article by Jessica Pressler , whose fictionalized counterpart, called Elizabeth, is played by Julia Stiles.) Raised by her grandmother in Queens, Destiny finds her way to a cavernous Manhattan skin palace with multiple stages, throbbing music and an endless supply of thirsty guys in suits. The job isn’t much fun until she meets Ramona (Jennifer Lopez), a larger-than-life figure who takes Destiny under her wing.

More literally, Ramona envelops Destiny in her luxuriant fur coat, a gesture that is maternal and sexual, campy and collegial all at once — an indication of Ramona’s complicated charisma. Ramona is warm, vain, ruthless and unpredictable, and Lopez gathers her contradictions into an incandescent one-woman spectacle. Lopez, a pop-culture legend in her own right, doesn’t so much peel away the layers of her stardom as repurpose them, channeling her exuberant physicality and her quick-witted self-assurance into a performance that is finely calibrated in its realism and brazen in its theatrics. You need made-up adjectives to convey the fusion of craft, nerve and energy that she pulls off: She’s Denzelian, Pacinoesque, downright Anna-Magnanimous .

“Hustlers” itself, unfortunately, doesn’t match the scale or audacity of what she does. Ramona is a big, bold, volatile personality inhabiting a story that is small, tentative and risk-averse. A few years after the crash, after an unhappy relationship has left Destiny raising a child on her own, she reunites with Ramona, who also has a daughter and who has found a new way to make money. Instead of working the pole and the V.I.P. rooms, she and Destiny — along with their colleagues, Mercedes (Keke Palmer) and Annabelle (Lili Reinhart) — scour the city’s bars for men of means who can be lured back to the strip club and parted from their credit cards.

Eventually the game shifts from a con to something more felonious, as the women, rather than plying their marks with drinks and winks, slip knockout drugs into their cocktails and empty their wallets and expense accounts. It’s not exactly a victimless crime, but “Hustlers” brushes off any serious ethical qualms, partly by making the men, for the most part, interchangeable jerks in an indefensible line of work.

Which would be fine if the movie had the courage of its populist convictions. But class struggle isn’t really at stake any more than gender equality is. The spirit of “Hustlers” is so insistently affirmative and celebratory that all kinds of interesting matters are left unexplored.

Scafaria makes it clear that she is on Destiny and Ramona’s side. They are loyal friends, devoted mothers, comfortable with their bodies and their choices. All of which is welcome, given the long tradition of treating strippers as easy objects of titillation and moral hand-wringing. But the movie seems to view any examination of its characters’ motives, their working conditions or the consequences of their actions as a kind of betrayal. There are feints in the direction of realism and social inquiry, but every time she might dig a little deeper into Destiny’s inner life or Ramona’s relationships, Scafaria falls back into bubbly girl-boss montages and luxury-brand consumer fetishism.

The problem isn’t a refusal of judgment, but rather an absence of perspective, a have-it-all-ways approach to the material that feels evasive. Late in the game — when the game is pretty much up — Ramona asserts that “this whole city, this whole country, is one big strip club,” a metaphor that would be more provocative if the movie had backed it up, had showed any real curiosity about the moral, economic and erotic transactions that keep the hustle running. But maybe that’s the lesson: The money keeps flowing, and nobody’s ever really satisfied.

Rated R. A lot of what a lot of men would pay a lot to see. Running time: 1 hour 50 minutes.

A.O. Scott is the co-chief film critic. He joined The Times in 2000 and has written for the Book Review and The New York Times Magazine. He is also the author of “Better Living Through Criticism.” More about A.O. Scott

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Toronto Film Review: ‘Hustlers’

Leveraging every iota of her appeal to astonishing effect, Jennifer Lopez plays an enterprising dancer with an illegal get-rich scheme in Lorene Scafaria's true-crime romp.

By Peter Debruge

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Sexuality is a weapon in “ Hustlers ,” empowering the women who wield it in this seductive true-crime saga, which does for a gang of New Yawk bad girls what “Goodfellas” did for the mob — which is to say, it brings Champagne-rush sex appeal and neon-lit style to a wild case in which a crew of enterprising female dancers stripped several rich Wall Street clients of a fortune. Flashy, fleshy and all-around impossible to ignore, “Hustlers” amounts to nothing less than a cultural moment, inspired by an outrageous New York Magazine profile (which serves as the sturdy six-inch stilettos on which the movie stands) adapted by writer-director Lorene Scafaria at her most Scorsese, and starring Jennifer Lopez like you’re never seen her before.

“This whole country’s a strip club. You’ve got people tossing the money and people doing the dance,” Lopez’s Ramona tells Julia Stiles (in all-business, “Bourne Identity” mode), who plays a version of nonjudgmental journalist Jessica Pressler, investigating the case. Practically everyone in “Hustlers” is playing some version of a real person, although Stiles is just about the only one (of the women, at least) whose casting doesn’t amount to a million-dollar makeover. The people “doing the dance” here are nearly all names — from “Crazy Rich Asians” star Constance Wu and “Riverdale” girl next door Lili Reinhardt to supporting players Keke Palmer, Cardi B and Lizzo — which collectively flatters a profession previously thought scandalous.

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In the quarter-century since “Showgirls,” a line of work once dismissed as degrading has been almost completely reevaluated in light of third-wave feminism — of which Madonna serves as poster girl (and an obvious role model for Lopez’s own career), a kind of pop-culture dominatrix who made “sex” her brand and turned lingerie into a kind of battle armor onstage. Instead of rejecting all that seemed misogynistic and corrupt in society, Gen Xers set out to subvert those institutions from within.

Suddenly, pole dancing classes were being offered at gyms across America, while Page Six party girls and self-made porn stars were being treated as celebrities. A brilliant young writer, who made a devilishly clever name for herself blogging about life as a “candy girl,” won an Oscar for penning a deceptively wholesome pro-choice comedy. And a group of New York strippers — who baited, drugged and stole from the rich to give to their relatively poor selves — were hailed as the defiant heroines in what the press called “a modern Robin Hood story.”

By incorporating Pressler’s reporting into her big-screen treatment, Scafaria raises questions about representation right off the top: What kind of biases do outsiders bring when they think about strippers? “Hustlers” humanizes the women at its center, giving them boyfriends, backstories and, most importantly, agency. The dancers are smart enough to embody any number of male fantasies, but they do so on their terms, and Scafaria never loses sight of the fact that they’re the ones in control at all times: “Drain the clock, not the c—,” Ramona advises wide-eyed ingenue Destiny (Wu), explaining, in crude but catchy terms, how strippers are paid to tease, not to fulfill their clients’ desires.

The real Ramona, Samantha Foxx (actual name: Barbash), was well into her 30s when met Roselyn Keo (on whom Destiny was modeled). A multitalent who has never been less than the most electric entity on screen in anything she’s done, Lopez has more than a decade on her character, and yet the superstar — who got her start dancing as a Fly Girl on “In Living Color” — astonishes, showing Olympic-medal moves in her introductory scene. Destiny’s transfixed (and so are we) to see Ramona outdo Cirque du Soleil, floating, spinning and all-around dazzling onstage like some kind of radiant carousel mermaid, before sliding upside down to the floor, where she clacks her shoes loudly as she pulls off the splits.

This is what failed auteur Steve Antin was going for with his embarrassing “Burlesque”: “Hustlers” represents an acrobatic celebration of unbridled femininity, in which liberated ladies take full advantage of the power they hold over men — who, in this equation, are by far the weaker sex, slaves to a libido satisfied only by spending. Of course, there are plenty who would dismiss such a display as a compromise of a woman’s true strengths, but “Hustlers” doesn’t have time for such arguments. If you’ve got it, flaunt it, the movie seems to say, celebrating a wide range of body types as beautiful while limiting just how much ogling audiences are permitted.

Destiny’s new-girl status excuses Wu’s relatively clumsy moves (in any case, her performance is better spent playing the movie’s conflicted moral center) while giving Scafaria reason to walk audiences through the profession. Unless you’ve given or gotten a lap dance yourself, the rules of the game are not at all obvious — and frankly, remain a bit too mysterious in their impartial explanation here. At a club like Moves (a composite of Scores, Flash Dancers and Larry Flynt’s Hustler Club), the women earn nothing for dancing but work for tips, giving a hefty cut (40% to 50%) to the club, which provides the rooms where the patrons start to get really generous.

In “Hustlers,” it’s the dancers who do the objectifying, reducing their male customers to a collection of shallow stereotypes (only Usher, playing a big-spending version of himself, emerges unscathed). Most come off like Frank Whaley, looking smug and smarmy as a fat-cat patron allowed to enter through the back, the way Ray Liotta does the Copacabana in “Goodfellas.” That movie’s famous Steadicam shot also inspires this film’s fluorescent-lit opening scene, which shadows Destiny from dressing room to stage.

Some of these one-dimensional Wall Street guys — bankers and brokers who make millions in variously dishonest ways — don’t hesitate to drop six figures in a single visit. “They can be degrading, aggressive, possessive and violent,” Destiny tells her interviewer, although it’s up to our imaginations to decide how to interpret that (and mine’s not nearly sharp enough, since the character’s “anything goes” cynicism seems to contradict a scene where Destiny is later seen crying after she crosses the line with one douchebag).

Things are safer when the women work together — as Destiny starts to do with Ramona — which also makes it easier to coax more cash out of their human ATMs. “It’s a business, and it’s more honest than any transaction they did that day,” Destiny explains, buying Gucci bags with a stack of sweat-soaked singles while a prim-and-proper saleswoman looks on in mild disapproval.

And then the economy tanks. The customers get stingy. Overnight, the men seem to expect more for their money — and a new crop of impossibly gorgeous immigrants are willing to give it for $300 a pop (the movie treads a fine line of slut-shaming, attempting to distinguish between stripping and prostitution, while setting up a change of business whereby the women will wind up taking the men to fancy houses and hotel rooms to steal their credit cards). During the downturn, Destiny went off and had a kid, and though Ramona insists that “motherhood is an illness” — blaming her mom for where she wound up — she too has a daughter, and both feel the need to get creative in order to provide for their families.

Ramona calls it “fishing”: Since rich men can no longer be relied upon to find their way to the club on their own, the dancers must go out and entice them. Once they’ve ensnared an unsuspecting rube (who thinks he’s gotten lucky), they bring him back to Moves, where they’ve worked out an arrangement with the club, driving up the bill and splitting the spoils. That works fine for a while, but takes a turn when Ramona decides it would be easier if they started to spike the guys’ drinks with a substance, a home-baked cross between ecstasy and ketamine, that knocks them out.

“Hustlers” features not one but two scenes in which Lopez is shown pitching her plan to her sistahs, not to mention the mock-indignant one where Wu describes it to Stiles’ reporter — none of which seems especially plausible, much less necessary. As audiences, we don’t need to believe they thought it was safe, or that the use of narcotics was “normal.” But it would help to better understand the scam, which involves something about calling up their regulars, offering them a good time and then maxing out their credit cards.

In real life, Foxx and Keo took it too far, but they had a blast in the process, and their victims were men who, by virtue of their wealth and social entitlement, felt like money justified their mistreatment. That’s a gross oversimplification of the facts, but then, predation usually flows in the opposite direction. Too few movies acknowledge the effect and extent of sex work in the United States, and “Hustlers” at least finds the thrill in a case where a group of women did the exploiting. Recall the scene in “American Psycho” where yuppie serial killer Patrick Bateman takes a chain saw to two women, and this is payback of the sweetest kind.

That’s the spirit that drives Scafaria’s approach, with its slick, surface-oriented celebration of material excess. Shot and edited like a music video, full of “look at me” camera moves and gratuitously long montages, “Hustlers” is a radical subversion of how the profession has been depicted for the past century. Marisa Tomei may have made the most of her role in “The Wrestler,” but as Shirley MacLaine once put it in asserting her own options, there came a point when she got tired of playing hookers, doormats and victims — which were the best parts available to her at the time. And what of all those aspiring young starlets, relegated to working the pole, topless and anonymous, in a show like “The Sopranos”? Well, now they have their own “Goodfellas.”

Reviewed at Sunset Screening Room, Los Angeles, Sept. 3, 2019. (In Toronto Film Festival — Gala Presentations.) MPAA Rating: R. Running time: 110 MIN.

• Production: An STXfilms release of a STXfilms, Gloria Sanchez Prods., Nuyorican Prods. production. Producers: Jennifer Lopez, Jessica Elbaum, Elaine Goldsmith-Thomas, Benny Medina, Will Ferrell, Adam McKay, Lorene Scafaria. Executive producers: Megan Ellison, Pamela Thur, Alex Brown, Robert Simonds, Adam Fogelson.
• Crew: Director, writer: Lorene Scafaria. Camera (color, widescreen): Todd Banhazl. Editor: Kayla Emter. Music supervisor: Jason Markey.
• With: Constance Wu, Jennifer Lopez, Julia Stiles, Keke Palmer, Lili Reinhart , Mercedes Ruehl, Cardi B, Lizzo, Madeline Brewer, Frank Whaley, Jon Glaser.

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Hustlers Reviews

The interesting aspect of Hustlers is it is anchored in the desperation of the 2008 financial crisis, which makes the characters immediately relatable and acceptable...

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | May 15, 2024

Hustlers dazzles with complexity and great performances.

Full Review | Mar 8, 2023

“Hustlers” is a fairly basic crime drama that plays around with some good ideas but ultimately can’t quite get out of its own way.

Full Review | Original Score: 2.5/5 | Aug 21, 2022

With a string of summer films that had a shocking lack of edge and verve, Hustlers delivers the goods.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Aug 20, 2022

A film about women overcoming dehumanizing sexualization, ensuring the audience always sees the empowered woman behind the hustler.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/4 | Feb 23, 2022

Memory is notoriously tricky, and an absolute gas to play around with in film. And yet, like so much in Hustlers and beyond, Jennifer Lopez makes it look easy.

Full Review | Feb 3, 2022

Episode 49: Hustlers / Ad Astra / Two Lovers / ALTIPLANO

Full Review | Original Score: 58/100 | Oct 18, 2021

There's only one bad thing about Hustlers: It will ruin damn near every other film about strippers you've ever seen. But it's worth it.

Full Review | Sep 13, 2021

...it's a big, flashy, entertaining movie that poses a few interesting moral questions alongside the handbag porn...

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Sep 4, 2021

The most entertaining movie of the year.

Full Review | Original Score: A- | Aug 15, 2021

This is a quintessentially female narrative -- and it's all the better for it.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Jun 25, 2021

Both provocative and thoughtful, it's a showstopper of a film with a dynamite cast, and one of the year's most exciting and entertaining.

Full Review | Original Score: 4.5 / 5 | Jun 25, 2021

What a delight it is that just when cinema is about to get snobbish and cerebral that a film as confident, slick and vivacious as this comes out of the woodwork and surprises people.

Full Review | Original Score: 5/5 | Jun 22, 2021

The problem is you don't know whose point of view the story is told from.

Full Review | Jun 16, 2021

Hustlers is a triumph.

Full Review | Mar 15, 2021

Hustlers, like its protagonists, promotes itself under the facade of beauty and sex but hides behind it a story loaded with a social criticism that confronts the viewer. [Full review in Spanish]

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Feb 8, 2021

[Lopez] absolutely owns every second she's on screen.

Full Review | Feb 6, 2021

J-Lo and Constance Wu are just awesome and this film has a great soundtrack...

Full Review | Feb 3, 2021

A glitzy caper about money, friendship, and revenge.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Jan 31, 2021

The legs that Hustlers stands on really do belong to Lopez, who flashes her unbelievably fit body as she slides up and down the pole ... That is the fun of this film, its lack of concern for being a blatantly good time.

Full Review | Jan 29, 2021

Jennifer Lopez Is Utterly Mesmerizing in Hustlers

Lorene Scafaria’s new film is a fabulous showbiz caper stuffed with great performances and elevated by an ingenious script.

“Come on, climb in my fur,” Ramona Vega (played by Jennifer Lopez), the imperious mother bear at a Manhattan strip club, commands her new hire, Destiny (Constance Wu). Ramona is perched on a rooftop, smoking a cigarette and luxuriating in an ostentatious coat. Though she’s surrounded by industrial pipes and vents, she somehow manages to radiate glamour as she wraps her new protégé in her fuzzy pelt. The world around them is grimy, but Ramona is comforting and sensational, and in Lorene Scafaria’s Hustlers , she’s at the center of a scheme that might sound ludicrous if the audience hadn’t seen her looking so resplendent on that roof.

The film, based on Jessica Pressler’s New York article “ The Hustlers at Scores ,” follows Ramona, Destiny, and several other New York City strippers as they ride the boom times of Wall Street in the early 2000s and then scramble to stay in business after the 2008 recession. The movie accurately depicts that tumultuous era, but it’s also just a fabulous showbiz caper—a tale of excess and shifting power dynamics that’s packed with great lines and even greater performances. At the center of it all is Lopez, a superstar who so rarely gets to flex her acting muscles; I haven’t been this captivated by her on the big screen since her career-defining work in 1998’s Out of Sight .

Scafaria’s ingenious script first lays out the basics of the world, as Destiny tries to establish herself at a strip club dominated by Ramona and flooded with dollar-bill-waving finance goons. The screenplay could have been rife with backstabbing and betrayal, but once Ramona invites Destiny to curl up in her fur coat within the first 15 minutes, the film morphs into an amped-up celebration of friendship and sisterhood in a world marginalized by polite society. Then, when the market downturn hits and the horny stockbrokers stop visiting, Ramona and Destiny devise new, illegal ways to continue making money and end up presiding over a miniature criminal empire.

Hustlers would be fun enough if Ramona served as a preening villain who seduces Destiny into a life of ill repute. But Scafaria never takes the easy way out, never entirely tips the balance in one character’s favor or tuts at another’s immorality or misbehavior. Hustlers is set in a seedy world where every stakeholder—the businessmen running the strip clubs, and their venal counterparts who make up the clientele—already stands on shaky ethical ground. Scafaria illustrates the myriad ways Destiny and her friends are exploited by an industry that doesn’t value them as humans, and then lets viewers exult a little as they try to claw the power back, even if we know their success can’t last forever.

Ramona is the film’s emotional core: She is capable of callousness and has a short temper, but she’s also fiercely loyal and preternaturally bewitching. In recent years, Lopez has too often taken roles in movies such as Second Act and The Boy Next Door that lacked an edge, a sense of danger to complement her natural charm. From the moment when, minutes into Hustlers , she storms into the club accompanied by a period-appropriate soundtrack of danceable bangers, it’s hard not to fall under her sway, just as Destiny does. There’s no scorching romance at the heart of this narrative. The central love story is the one between these two friends, which is disrupted when the girls start drugging men and running up charges on their credit cards.

As the group (which includes Keke Palmer and Lili Reinhart, both giving wonderful performances) weaves its tangled web, the film could have pushed aside the fun digressions and celebrity cameos for a sober reminder that what Ramona and Destiny did was wrong. But Scafaria has enough respect for the audience not to lecture them. Her last movie, 2016’s The Meddler , had a similarly formulaic-sounding premise (a daughter is hassled by her dotty and controlling mother), yet it ignored obvious tropes in favor of warm characterization and emotional depth. Hustlers features too fine an ensemble to descend into moralizing. Instead, Scafaria reckons with the economic hardship Ramona and her crew faced, and how it pushed them to ignore the brutality of their actions.

Hustlers would work as a goofy comedy; it works even better as a thoughtful one, crammed with killer lines and supporting work from both acting veterans (Julia Stiles) and fresh faces (Cardi B). It’s a salute to extravagance that knows when to cut loose and when to hold on quiet, introspective beats. Ramona’s big fur coat is the silliest, most impractical kind of luxury, but it’s hard not to feel Destiny’s instant comfort once she’s swaddled in it. Hustlers is just that: a lush, lavish joy that’s difficult to forget.

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Hustlers , the Year’s Best Movie, Will Make You a Believer

By Brennan Carley

There’s a moment, not ten minutes into Lorene Scafaria’s bulletproof new movie Hustlers , that immediately vaults Jennifer Lopez into the pantheon of “greatest cinematic introductions of all time.” It’s 2007, and we’re inside a strobe-lit strip club in Manhattan. Constance Wu’s Destiny is staring at the stage. The DJ turns on his microphone. “And now, let’s welcome to the main stage, the one, the only, Ramona!” Lopez slinks into frame in a bedazzled captain’s hat and matching cape; this is her boat now. The DJ pipes Fiona Apple’s “Criminal” in from the club’s speakers as the 50-year-old icon begins to dance. Dollars shower her. Patrons—the ones not hollering and slamming their sweaty palms on the side of the stage—sit back stunned, their jaws slack, their eyes glazed over, as Lopez masterfully works a gilded pole as shimmering as her outfit.

Reminder: this is how Hustlers , the year’s best movie thus far, begins . Starting with a bang is one thing, though; maintaining that energy throughout its entire runtime is what makes this strippers-turned-criminals flick such a masterful feat.

Based on a New York Magazine article, “The Hustlers at Scores,” by Jessica Pressler (tagline: “Here’s a modern Robin Hood story for you: a few strippers who stole from (mostly) rich, (usually) disgusting, (in their minds) pathetic men and gave to, well, themselves”), Hustlers follows Lopez’s Ramona and Wu’s Destiny as they team up together with their fellow dancers at the peak of the 2008 financial crisis to, frankly, bleed Wall Street bigwigs dry. They lace their drinks with stupor-inducing drug cocktails, and swipe their platinum cards freely without batting an eyelash or, really, lifting a finger. If you’ve read the story (or seen literally any movie at all before), you’ll know the towering heights the women ascend to—expensive furs, penthouse apartments, cars as big as yachts, bags as big as cars—prove unsustainable as the women’s operations expand.

But my god what a journey this movie takes before it gets to that crash landing, shepherded by an excellent Wu— Hustlers flashes forward, on occasion, to interview segments with Destiny years later as a narrative device, which works well and is only minimally obtrusive—who is equal parts steely and affected in her starring role here. She’s funny and observant, and the speed at which she becomes the group’s real ringleader, credit or not, is believable only because Wu sells that cocktail of confidence and to-hell-with-this exasperation so effortlessly.

Hustlers is aided by the year’s strongest supporting cast, playing to strengths in ways big (chart-topper Lizzo’s R-rated use of a flute backstage at the club) and small (supernova Cardi B’s very minimal onscreen time, used to pitch-perfect effect; get this woman a starring vehicle ASAP). Transparent star Trace Lysette shines whenever she’s given camera time; Keke Palmer and Lili Reinhart do excellent, quick supporting work and are both finally given ample opportunity to flex their extremely versatile chops in roles that don’t reduce them to mere sidekicks. And I’d be loathe to forget G-Eazy, who shows up in a small, surprise role as Wu’s boyfriend, making the most of his brief moments.

But this is unquestionably Jennifer Lopez’s moment. Ramona presents a challenge. She needs to be both alluring and dangerous; audiences have to sympathize with her, to understand why she’s committing these crimes, why she’s roping in other young women, why she’s getting reckless, why she’s willing to overlook clear cracks in the foundation of her plan because the whole thing’s gotten too out of control. On those fronts and more, Lopez delivers. Her Ramona is warm, like the fur coat on her shoulders that she opens up to Destiny early on. She’s weary, too, tired of shitty bosses (Jon Glaser in a great bit part as a manager), of not truly owning every cent of what she’s earned. Lopez has long been an incredibly overlooked actress (do people never tire of making Gigli jokes? Is that why we so often breeze past her sharp, controlled excellence in movies like Maid in Manhattan or Monster-in-Law ?). In Hustlers , the floor is hers to cede. If there’s justice in the world, there’s awards play in her future.

Towards the end of the film (and yes, spoilers ahead), Ramona’s pushed into a cold, metal seat in a nondescript police precinct somewhere downtown. She’s in a black velvet hoodie, her hair immaculate, her jewelry catching every beam of fluorescent light. “We didn’t do anything wrong,” she says, despite the fact that she’s been caught and she knows it. But none of that matters. What does it that you believe her. And believe her, you do.

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‘Hustlers’ Review: Lorene Scafaria’s Wildly Entertaining Crime Thriller Will Change Stripper Movies Forever

Kate erbland, editorial director.

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Filmmaker Lorene Scafaria has made just three feature films over the course of the last seven years, pacing out her nifty dramedies like “Seeking a Friend for the End of the World” and “The Meddler,” perhaps in hopes that the film world will move past its affection for genre conventions and stop attempting to slot everything into a single box. If Scafaria has a signature, it’s emotional comedy-dramas about good people pushed to crazy ends, a concept she’s approached from both extremes, moving from a literal apocalypse to an overbearing mother.

Considered from that vantage, Scafaria’s third film, “ Hustlers ,” is a natural fit for her oeuvre, even as its splashy plotline (incorrectly) hints at a wholly different experience. It’s not only Scafaria’s best film, it’s also a welcome twist on the crime thriller genre (if we must apply genre distinctions here) and the ripped-from-the-headlines, can-you-believe-this-is real drama. And, yes, it’s also a film about strippers, but more than that, it’s about women doing the best they can in a broken system. It’s also funny, empowering, sexy, emotional, and a bit scary, with most of those superlatives coming care of a full-force performance from Jennifer Lopez genuinely deserving of awards consideration.

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Adapted by Scafaria herself, the film is framed around the creation of the article it’s based on, Jessica Pressler’s viral New York Magazine story titled “The Hustlers at Scores.” All names have been changed — including Pressler’s; Julia Stiles stands in for her as a character named Elizabeth. Some roles have been condensed, but the truth of what Pressler wrote about the nutty, wily crimes of said hustlers hasn’t been altered. Mostly narrated by Destiny (Constance Wu) during the course of a chat with the empathic Elizabeth (a neat twist of narrative plotting), “Hustlers” easily moves back and forth between the past (divided into two segments) and the apparent future, in which Destiny has clearly shed her stripper ways.

What happens in between the present and those two pasts is key, and it all starts in a glitzy strip club in the hard of Manhattan. Destiny’s career path is not working out so well for her when the film opens, all banging Janet Jackson jams and a jittery Destiny doing her damnedest to stand out enough to earn some scratch from the sleazeballs who frequent the club. And then there is Ramona (Lopez), introduced during a brain-meltingly sexy and powerful pole dance in which she gyrates to Fiona Apple (!), makes stripping look like both an art and an athletic pursuit, compels the sleazeballs to unload their wallets, and turns Destiny into an eager-eyed puddle of envy and inspiration.

Lopez owns the film, just like Ramona owns the club, and the fine line Lopez walks between fierce queen and relatable everywoman is essential to the rare balance the film strikes. It’s impossible to imagine another actress giddily showing off her denim swimwear line (named “Swimona”) in her posh Upper East Side apartment with the kind of pathos Lopez strikes, but that’s just the sort of thing the actress does again and again (and better each time) in “Hustlers.”

Destiny (and Scafaria) take their time before getting down to the crimes, and the first half of “Hustlers” operates a bit like a coming-of-age story, with Ramona taking Destiny under her wing and teaching her how to excel in the clubbing, complete with pole-dancing lessons and more than a few tips on how to get the most bang for her “champagne room” buck. Surrounded by the rest of their sistren — a stacked supporting cast that includes Cardi B, Lizzo, Trace Lysette, Keke Palmer, Mercedes Ruehl, and later Lili Reinhart and Madeline Brewer — Destiny excels, and life is very sweet.

Until it’s not, and the real world intrudes on the unlikely idyll she and Ramona have created. It will not be the last time. Years later, Destiny returns to the club, only to find it — and Ramona — changed. As much a film about Wall Street troubles and the financial crisis of the late aughts as it is about exotic dancers, “Hustlers” soon blossoms into the kind of snappy sendup producer Adam McKay might make, with a deft and definite feminine touch.

The mechanics of the scheme that the reunited Ramona and Destiny eventually cook up are complex, both literally and morally, and Scafaria and her stars aren’t afraid to mine those narrative thickets for entertainment and intellect. Essentially, the gals (and some of their whip-smart pals) go hunting for big game (read: moneyed dudes), drug them up, take them to the club, and charge whatever the hell they want on their credit cards. Half horrifying and half wickedly fun, Ramona and Destiny breathlessly muscle their way through a system that doesn’t care for them, reaping the rewards, and growing less and less recognizable in the process.

Later in the film, Elizabeth tells Destiny that she doesn’t think they did anything wrong — maybe because she believes it, maybe because she wants to soften up a source growing more combative with each interview detail — and Destiny finally seems to snap out of her years-long fog. Wu looks at Stiles with such blazing disbelief that it wounds both of them. “Hustlers” doesn’t offer easier answers than that, instead trusting its audience to draw its own conclusions, believing that they’re smart enough to know the difference between compelling characters and real goodness they may or may not possess.

For all its touchy subjects and ambiguous answers, “Hustlers” is never anything less than energetic, freight-train-fast, and impeccably plotted. Eventually, Destiny shares a persistent nightmare with Elizabeth: she’s riding in a car, and realizes no one is driving, and as she attempts to chuck herself at the steering wheel and the pedals, it’s already too late. Nothing in “Hustlers” feel as out of control as that; instead it’s Scafaria and her ladies, one hand on the wheel, one hand throwing up a blinged-out middle finger to the world that doesn’t value them. No one will make that same mistake with “Hustlers.”

STX Entertainment will release “Hustlers” in theaters on Friday, September 13. The film premiered at the 2019 Toronto International Film Festival.

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Jennifer Lopez brings more than body glitter to smart strip-club drama Hustlers

The Martini; the Fireman; the Peter Pan: You will get a thorough tutorial in these moves, and many more, in Hustlers . But the real lessons in Lorene Scafaria’s lucite-heeled drama aim to land a little deeper; behind the lap-dance dazzle, it’s essentially a story about class, friendship, ambition, and the things people do when money and morality meet (or rather, when they don’t).

Constance Wu ( Crazy Rich Asians ) is a young dancer from Queens who goes by Destiny; Jennifer Lopez is her Bronx-born mentor, Ramona — the kind of ravishing, bikini-clad goddess that men can’t seem to help throwing down half their paychecks for.

First she takes Destiny under her wing, showing her how to work the champagne room, upgrade her taste in handbags and stilettos, and navigate the tricky hierarchy of middlemen, grifters, and high rollers with gold cards to burn. (There are other girls in the mix too, including colorful supporting turns from Cardi B and Lizzo).

Then, when the 2008 financial crash knocks the bottom out of clubs like theirs, Ramona turns to more creative accounting; specifically, by separating men from their credit limits through any means (seduction, distraction, MDMA-roofie cocktails) necessary.

Scafaria’s screenplay, based on a viral 2015 New York magazine profile by Jessica Pressler, goes heavy on the music cues and montages. But Lopez (who seems to hold the center of every scene she’s in) and Wu bring a soulfulness and desperation to their roles that defy easy profiling. Yes, they’re single moms from disadvantaged backgrounds, but the script doesn’t martyr them or offer excuses for the choices they make. What it does, smartly if sometimes a little too neatly, is make them feel real.

The room it leaves for that humanity — and the draw of Lopez’s magnetic presence — gives the movie more than legs; beneath all the chinchilla and body glitter, there’s a smart, beating heart. B+

( Hustlers premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival on Saturday, and arrives in wide release Sept. 13.)

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Hustlers Review: Jennifer Lopez Dominates in a Quintessential American Story

By Richard Lawson

There’s a line at the very end of Hustlers , Lorene Scafaria’s dazzling new film that had its world premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival on Saturday, that tidily sums up the movie. Jennifer Lopez, deep into some of the best acting work of her career, sighs and muses that America is a strip club; some people are the ones throwing the money around, and the rest are the dancers. It’s a neat little encompassing of all the riot that’s come before—clever, street-smart wise, and sad in a sweet, poetic way. It’s delivered beautifully by Lopez, a film-closing button that perfectly distills the energy of the film and its ideas.

Hustlers —based on a New York Magazine article by Jessica Pressler about New York City strippers who drugged wealthy clients to rack up huge charges on their credit cards in the dizzying wake of the 2008 financial crisis—could easily have been a basic thing, a fabulous cast assembled to tell an engaging, risqué story of grift and shiny wrongdoing. You know: lots of tee-heeing and titillation, as good times curdle into bad ones.

But Scafaria had a larger vision in mind in making her film. Hustlers is a movie about work, and women, and economy, neither forgiving of its protagonists’ crimes nor those of the people they preyed upon. It’s a bright stiletto stab toward equity, and in the process one of the best movies about American money in recent memory.

Constance Wu, raw and flinty, plays Destiny, a Queens native who earns a middling but not station-elevating income at a Manhattan strip club. When she meets Ramona, the veteran dancer played with coiling wit by Lopez, a new ambition emerges. Destiny’s profession is an intensely transactional one—not just of cash, but of status, a constant and deliberate reminder of class and position. What Ramona sees is an opportunity to tip the scales of that transaction; soon, so does Destiny.

Why should it be the rapacious, hedonist Wall Street men, drunk on their ruinous control of things, who get to flit in and out of this arrangement forever in the black? There’s a Robin Hood element to the crimes of Hustlers , even if it means that Destiny, Ramona, and their cohort employ are dangerous and quickly sapped of empathy. Hustlers presents a tricky moral equation, one that Scafaria contemplates with a graceful vigor.

Hustlers moves and moves and moves. It’s a vibrant, muscular study in physics. Scafaria’s staging and Todd Banhazl’s cinematography rollicks along, both crisp and woozy. We feel the party of the film, but also never forget its dire gravity: there’s a stunning (and surprising?) emotional core burning at the center of the film, like a sparking fuel cell. Scafaria jaunts forward and backward in time, lays out exposition and detail in a clamoring patter. Things still feel controlled, though; there’s a purpose and method to this music-filled madness. For how fun Hustlers is, it also knows its own darkness.

I didn’t expect this from the director of The Meddler , a sweet and gentle film that I dearly love. That was Scafaria’s last effort behind the camera, and while it’s a more than worthy showcase for her abundant talent, Hustlers rockets past it with mesmerizing exuberance. I’ve seen so many festival films this season that mistake daring camera work and kinetic fury for substance, but Hustlers does no such thing. It finds a fullness in the flair, affording these strippers turned crooks all the messy contours of real life while still rendering them in stunning, artful portrait.

At the center of all that is the complicated friendship shared by Destiny and Ramona, at once parasitic and genuine. Here’s how people—women, in particular—might align themselves under oppressions both systemic and achingly particular. They’re drawn to one another not solely out of desperate necessity, but because, quite simply, they enjoy one another’s company. That spirit of war-trenches camaraderie is rife in Hustlers —the starry cast also includes Riverdale ’s __Lili Reihart, Keke Palmer, and the musicians Cardi B and Lizzo. It’s a true assemblage of avengers, women (all played beautifully) who seize and upend what could be a slowly crushing power dynamic.

But again, Hustlers does not excuse the wrongdoing, exactly. It instead seeks to understand it. Scafaria’s film does that keenly, framing the narrative’s internal consequence in fair proportion to all the bigger lawlessness that shapes the lives of its characters. Someone else would be doing this to these guys if they weren’t, Ramona insists to her crew. She’s tragically right about the practical realities of this sorry enterprise, and about how the difference between need and want blurs when one is doing so bitterly American a thing as looking out for oneself.

The men of the Magic Mike movies have a lot less on their minds, because their existence is mostly a lark. The meat market of Hustlers is inevitably more dire. Still, a good time is had. Scafaria’s camera gazes and gazes, but never leers with anything less than awe. When Destiny first sees Ramona, doing an eye-poppingly acrobatic routine to Fiona Apple’s Criminal (Lopez nails this so hard the room shakes), a heady desire passes through the room. But Scafaria carefully trains that ardency; we understand the complexity of Destiny’s amazement, and how simple it is too.

Hustlers works really well on both of those levels, the base and the nearly profound. It’s sexy on its own terms, guided by an intricate ethic. Yes, it is the cool stripper-robber movie with the awesome cast. But it’s also a true movie for our era, teeming with the confusion and yearning and risk of life right now. It’s a deeply humane film, one that finds celebration, and illumination, in the dark spaces where so many grind.

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‘hustlers’: film review | tiff 2019.

THR review: Jennifer Lopez and Constance Wu star in 'Hustlers,' Lorene Scafaria's film about a group of New York City strippers conning their Wall Street clientele.

By Beandrea July

Beandrea July

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Few trailer drops this year have generated as much buzz as the one for  Hustlers ,   Lorene Scafaria’s film — adapted from a 2015  New York Magazine   story  by Jessica Pressler — about a group of New York City strippers who con their wealthy clients out of thousands of dollars a night. Television powerhouse  Shonda Rhimes  wrote, in reaction to the preview: “Every five years or so there is a movie I am driven to actually leave my house to go see no matter what anyone says — this is that movie.”

Rhimes is 100 percent correct. After watching veteran stripper Ramona ( Jennifer Lopez ) deliver an unforgettable stage performance that firmly establishes her as the kingpin 15 minutes in, we know this is a movie made to be experienced with an audience.

Release date: Sep 12, 2019

Hustlers delivers on its hype while consistently doing the unexpected. Scafaria, whose last pic was the 2016 Susan Sarandon vehicle The Meddler , excels at immersing the audience in the world of sex work in clubs, quietly disabusing us scene by scene of any stereotypes about who these women are. Part workplace dramedy, part revenge fantasy, the film weaves together a series of satisfying, organic-feeling turns.

This is a movie about strippers running a con, yes, but it is also much more than that — it’s an incisive commentary on women in the workplace, including breadwinning mothers, navigating an economy that disadvantages them. Surprisingly enough, it shares cinematic DNA with the 1981 juggernaut 9 to 5 .

Hustlers  is also a welcome addition to the collection of Hollywood movies about the 2008 financial crisis ( The Big Short , The Queen of Versailles, Margin Call ) in that Scafaria tells the story from the perspective of working-class women affected by the economic collapse, not Wall Street guys at the top.

The opening scene of the movie is the first day of work for Destiny ( Constance Wu ) and the camera movement is from her point of view, following her from the dressing room to the stage. Later, there’s another scene shot with almost the exact same camera movement, showing Destiny rushing home from a harrowing night with a client to take her daughter to school in their suburban neighborhood. It’s a poignant visual pairing that underscores the stakes for Destiny and other women like her.

When the 2008 financial crash hits, business at the club Destiny works at nosedives. Led by the enterprising Ramona, Destiny, Mercedes ( Keke Palmer ) and Annabelle (Lili Reinhart) take to upscale bars, where they spike drinks of their wealthy male targets with just enough ketamine and MDMA to make these men hand over their credit cards without totally blacking out. How things unfold from there should not be spoiled for those who want to see the movie without reading the article it’s based on.

Wu delivers a sharp performance that confidently conveys Destiny’s emotional vulnerabilities. It’s a delight to see Cardi B and Lizzo play variations on their public and artistic personas, and Palmer and Reinhart do solid work.

But not enough can be written about how stunning Lopez is in perhaps her best performance to date. Playing Ramona with understated confidence, the actress creates a tough cookie who keeps things light; she doesn’t question the rules of the game — she has studied them so she can break them properly. Far from an audacious, real housewife type, she represents a group of hardworking single mothers across America quietly struggling to provide for their children. It’s a nuanced depiction rarely seen in crowd-pleasing films like this. (Only two lead roles went to a Latina actress age 45 or older in the 1,200 top-grossing box office movies from 2007-2018, and Lopez played them both.)

The film impressively somersaults past any stigma attached to stripping and sex work, emphasizing how the main characters are run-of-the-mill American workers regardless of their particular job. It’s not about convincing anyone that stripping is empowering or disempowering, or that hustling is or isn’t wrong; it’s about all the gray areas in between. Scafaria validates her heroines from the start by focusing on them as women whose internal struggles and friendships with each other are far more interesting than their obvious physical allure.

Some of the few complex depictions of sex workers we’ve seen in recent years have been on critically acclaimed television series like HBO’s The Deuce and FX’s Atlanta ;  Hustlers is a worthy big-screen addition. Without creating a utopia divorced from reality, the pic punches up in a way that is largely unexplored in film: Rich white men here play objects who are underdeveloped almost to the point of buffoonery. Their bodies are taken advantage of by the heroines of the movie, women whose legal options for real economic advancement are limited. The film wants us to see that what the women do isn’t nearly as important as why they do it.

From the strip club to the bars where they find their marks, the rooms where these women work are dimly lit, a visual statement of subtext. Scafaria is smart to use the interview between the journalist who originally broke this story (played here by Julia Stiles) and Destiny as a narrative framing device that makes the flashbacks and voiceover feel fresh, like they are happening in real-time.

Although the women of Hustlers are clearly stepping over a very thin, dark line between working the system and criminal behavior, you can’t help but root for them and all women who are tired of struggling financially and decide to use what they know to get ahead. It’s a classic underdog story about the kind of Americans people don’t often think of as self-made. With so much talk about the “forgotten working class” since the 2016 presidential election, Hustlers makes clear that women of color in cities are also a part of that group. In other words: Don’t hate the player, hate the game.

Production companies: Annapurna Pictures, Gloria Sanchez Productions, STX Films Distributor: STX Films Cast: Constance Wu, Jennifer Lopez, Julia Stiles, Keke Palmer, Lili Reinhart, Mercedes Ruehl, Cardi B Writer-director: Lorene Scafaria Executive producers: Megan Ellison, Pamela Thur, Alex Brown, Robert Simonds, Adam Fogelson Producers: Jennifer Lopez, Jessica Elbaum, Elaine Goldsmith-Thomas, Benny Medina, Will Ferrell, Adam McKay, Lorene Scafaria Director of photography: Todd Banhazl Production designer: Jane Musky Editor: Kayla Emter Venue: Toronto International Film Festival (Gala Presentations)

Rated R,  110 minutes

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Review: Jennifer Lopez's 'Hustlers' is so good, it almost makes up for 'Showgirls'

Jennifer Lopez gets her own girl gang in “ Hustlers ,” and the results are criminal and pretty fabulous.

Based on a 2015 magazine article about strippers fleecing their wealthy Wall Street clientele, writer/director Lorene Scafaria’s gratifying comedy/drama (★★★½ out of four; rated R; in theaters nationwide Friday) is so good it almost makes up for “Showgirls,” “Striptease” and “Burlesque.” “Hustlers” is empathetic and understanding in the way it looks at sex workers as also single moms and women just trying to get by in a world where the rich seemingly only get richer. It also works as an enjoyable, empowering extravaganza of physical humor, clever script writing, exquisite fashion and scantily clad underdogs.

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The film centers on Destiny (Constance Wu) in 2007, when she’s a rookie exotic dancer, and also seven years later as she recounts her involvement in some shady escapades to a wide-eyed journalist (Julia Stiles). The woman really running the show is Ramona (Lopez), though, a force of nature in fur who takes Destiny under her wing, teaches her the ins and outs of pole dancing, and imparts know-how to tease extra tips from customers.

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Both Destiny and Ramona want to make money and take care of their families, so when the 2008 financial crisis hits, the glory days go away, too. To make ends meet, they form a corporation of sorts with co-workers Annabelle (Lili Reinhart) and Mercedes (Keke Palmer). At first they just get their marks drunk and snag a few thousand here and there, but the women grow more ambitious and reckless with their schemes, turning to chemical cocktails so they can max out credit cards while the dudes look like they’re extras on “Weekend at Bernie’s.”

Lopez is obviously a multi-hyphenate star , but she goes supernova here in her best cinematic showing since 1998’s “Out of Sight.” With Ramona, she creates a character very much into sisterhood and family, with enough instances of greed and questionable decision-making where her cryptic allegiances form an extra undercurrent of drama. And there’s the fact she’s just a showstopper and still a Fly Girl: Lopez has a pole-dancing routine set to Fiona Apple’s “Criminal” that’s simply phenomenal and positively gravity-defying.

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Lopez sparks off Wu, her onscreen partner in crime, and their close friendship (followed by the cracks that form within) grounds the movie. Other big names show up fleetingly, although they make the most of their time, including Cardi B as the club’s resident lap-dance expert, Lizzo playing the flute and even Usher preening for a quick cameo.

With “Hustlers” being ostensibly the “Avengers” and "Star Wars" of stripper movies, Scafaria juggles a large cast well and still keeps the momentum humming along. It’s a big shift from Scafaria’s last project, underrated heartwarmer “The Meddler,” yet she balances the joyous fun with the larger moral questions at play. Even though the men (with a few exceptions) are mostly one-dimensional creeps, the women wrestle with the consequences of what they’re doing, with some feeling guilty and others sticking it to The Man, collectively speaking.

“Hustlers” lays bare the hopes and dreams of women bonded through stilettos and dollar bills, without ever stripping away the movie’s wilder side.

Jennifer Lopez Is a Divine Queenpin in ‘Hustlers’

By Peter Travers

Peter Travers

A Best Actress Oscar nomination for Jennifer Lopez ? You better believe it. Her see-it-to-believe-it performance in Hustlers is that dazzling, that deep, that electrifying. At the Toronto Film Festival, where art films get the most attention, this glitzy true-crime knockout about New York strippers who take their drooling Wall Street clients to the cleaners, has been the talk of the town in advance of the movie’s national release this week. And for good reason. Hustlers promises and delivers a party-hard, wild ride. No one expected insights that pull you up short.

Writer-director Lorene Scafaria hits a career peak for scrappily adapting a 2015 New York magazine article by Jessica Pressler (a take-charge Julia Stiles using another name). The writer profiled a group of exotic dancers at Scores about facing criminal charges for scamming the men who treated them as objects for sale. Hustlers doesn’t pussyfoot about what goes on in those “champagne rooms” off stage. The intent is not to exploit but to show how women manage to live and work in a predatory man’s world. The question is control. And in Scafaria’s fiercely funny provocation of a film — there’s no running from the shadows — it’s the women who seize control. All together now — it’s about time.

If you want to know what a star’s entrance is — watch Lopez take the screen as if by divine right. As Ramona, a dancer who can work a pole better than rivals half her age, she slithers and shimmies on stage (to Fiona Apple’s “Criminal”) with a jaw-dropping finesse that’s as acrobatic as it is erotic. Dudes throw money at her. Academy members should follow by throwing their votes behind Lopez, who acts the role as well as she embodies it, finding reserves of feeling beneath a tough-cookie exterior. Aside from such early films as Selena and Out of Sight , Lopez has had to settle for being the best thing in movies that are indifferent or worse (remember Gigli ?). In Hustlers , her talent blossoms into something that takes your breath away.

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Even better, this time the movie is worthy of her talent. At a notorious Manhattan strip club, where celebs mingle with rich assholes of every stripe, Ramona is the queenpin to eager pupils played by the Riverdale ’s Lili Reinhart, Scream Queen ’s Keke Palmer and rap divas Cardi B and Lizzo in cameos you wish would go on longer. And as the reporter interviews the women, stories emerge that have the sting of reality not Hollywood. Still, the laser focus of Ramona’s attention fixes on Destiny, a newbie that a stellar Constance Wu ( Crazy Rich Asians, Fresh Off the Boat ) invests with flinty vitality and a touching vulnerability. For Destiny, Ramona’s blunt advice can be scary. “Drain the clock, not the cock,” says Ramona about the limits of fulfilling some dude’s sexual fantasies.

Scafaria doesn’t hide the fact that the job can be degrading. But she also shows us women — some abused children themselves and others single mothers — now being exploited by club owners who expect them to survive on tips they have to split with management. And when the 2008 recession hits, a plan is hatched. What if the women drug their big-spending clients with memory-blurring cocktails, max out their credit cards and share the profits with the club? Ramona rationalizes that these Wall Street wolves are hustling their clients on a way grander scale. As a movie, Hustlers walks a moral tightrope that can leave audiences queasy. But Scafaria is not in the judging business about strippers and sex workers. What she illuminates, with the help of a dynamite cast ignited by Lopez, is the sight of women in the workplace empowering each other. This you don’t want to miss.

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Common sense media reviewers.

J. Lo crime comedy glamorizes stripping; language, drugs.

A Lot or a Little?

What you will—and won't—find in this movie.

This is a cautionary tale about unexpected predato

The characters are a diverse group -- in terms of

An unconscious, bleeding man is injured off-camera

Frequent partial nudity including bare breasts and

Frequent strong language includes "bitch," "c--k,"

Money is literally thrown in the air (sometimes by

Repeated demonstrations of how to drug a target, a

Parents need to know that greed is portrayed as good in Hustlers, which mixes themes of female empowerment and friendship with criminal, unethical behavior. It feels like the other side of The Wolf of Wall Street , focusing on New York strippers who manipulated and conned their stockbroker clients to…

Positive Messages

This is a cautionary tale about unexpected predators and the slippery slope of compromising your ethics.

Positive Role Models

The characters are a diverse group -- in terms of race, body type, sexual identity, and more -- but strippers aren't typically role models/aspirational figures.

Violence & Scariness

An unconscious, bleeding man is injured off-camera and comically gets re-injured. A couple argues in front of their toddler. Male targets/victims are drugged.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Violence & Scariness in your kid's entertainment guide.

Sex, Romance & Nudity

Frequent partial nudity including bare breasts and barely covered backsides. Extensive visual modeling of "sexy" behavior, including teaching techniques for pole and lap dancing. Women dance sensually, sometimes undressing each other as they perform for men. A scene shows how a character decides to engage in a sex act for money and feels degraded afterward. Sex toy shown on-screen. Women use their sexuality as bait. Full-frontal male nudity used for humor. References to prostitution.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Sex, Romance & Nudity in your kid's entertainment guide.

Frequent strong language includes "bitch," "c--k," "f--k," "goddamn," "p---y," "d--k," "t--ties," "ass," and "s--t." Crass sexual language. The "N" word.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Language in your kid's entertainment guide.

Products & Purchases

Money is literally thrown in the air (sometimes by celebrities) and women are showered in it. Materialism is promoted, with characters buying fur coats, fancy cars (Cadillac Escalade is treated as the ideal luxury vehicle), and designer clothes (Gucci, Christian Laboutin, Bebe, Juicy) with their ill-gotten money.

Drinking, Drugs & Smoking

Repeated demonstrations of how to drug a target, as well as cooking methods to create the drugs used. Cocaine use and alcohol are shown as pathways to a good time -- but also as things that cloud good judgment. Champagne flows to celebrate, and wine is sipped to secure friendships. Cigarette smoking.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Drinking, Drugs & Smoking in your kid's entertainment guide.

Parents Need to Know

Parents need to know that greed is portrayed as good in Hustlers, which mixes themes of female empowerment and friendship with criminal, unethical behavior. It feels like the other side of The Wolf of Wall Street , focusing on New York strippers who manipulated and conned their stockbroker clients to the point of outright stealing. Thanks to the presence of aspirational celebrities like Jennifer Lopez , Constance Wu , Cardi B, Lizzo, and Keke Palmer , stripping comes across as the key to a glamorous life, in which women can get rich quick by using their sexuality as a weapon. Most of the men they scam are shown as sleazy, leering, gross, and corrupt, which suggests justification for the women's behavior. Yes, it's lots of fun and features a notably diverse cast, but it's also very mature: Expect drug and alcohol use/abuse, strong language ("f--k," "s--t," etc.), and sexual content -- including nudity, pole/lap dancing, prostitution, and more. To stay in the loop on more movies like this, you can sign up for weekly Family Movie Night emails .

Where to Watch

Videos and photos.

Community Reviews

• Parents say (16)
• Kids say (17)

Based on 16 parent reviews

What's the Story?

HUSTLERS is a crime comedy based on a New York Magazine article. It focuses on single mom Destiny ( Constance Wu ) and her mentor, Ramona ( Jennifer Lopez ), who are high-end strippers at a club in New York City. It's not necessarily what they aspired to, but they have responsibilities (kids, an aging grandmother, etc.). After the 2008 economic crash cripples their legal income streams, they and their colleagues come up with a series of scams to steal money and credit cards from their wealthy Wall Street clients. Julia Stiles , Keke Palmer , and Lili Reinhart -- as well as singers Cardi B, Lizzo, and Usher -- also star.

Is It Any Good?

Chris Rock famously said that "a father has one job: to keep their daughter off the pole"; this movie could make that job a lot tougher. Lopez may do more in Hustlers to make stripping look appealing than Howard Stern did with porn actresses. Every move she makes is charged with self-confidence, sexual empowerment, and superior awesomeness -- and that's problematic for teens. She may be "Ramona," but she's also Jenny from the Block, and when she writhes on stage, showered and rolling in dollar bills, stripping becomes -- as Wu's Destiny describes it -- "glamorous and cool."

It may be that director Lorene Scafaria is too good at her job, creating enviable fun and feminist justice out of criminal acts. She knows how to push our buttons when it comes to craving female friendships, a feeling that's intensified by the inclusion of popular music personalities (like lovable Lizzo and outspoken Cardi B, who's confessed to participating in a similar scam when she worked as a stripper). The friendships between the women and their stage "mom" (it's been too long, Mercedes Ruehl !) in the club's back room are as warm as Ramona's fur coat, and the sisterhood they form seems more emotionally satisfying than any sorority. As an audience member, you know that the female empowerment isn't exactly on the level, and yet it demonstrates something many of us long for: a large group of friends who are affectionate, supportive, and judgment-free. But most of the women are also ethics-free, and as their activities dive deeper into behavior that's immoral and illegal, they find justifications that will hold water with some of those watching. Hustlers may be the #MeToo generation's Fatal Attraction : a cautionary tale that corruption has consequences -- just not for the women.

Talk to Your Kids About ...

Families can talk about how Hustlers portrays exotic dancers. Do you think it makes the job look fun/cool? How does the director remove the shame from stripping -- and do you think it's fair that society has traditionally looked down on women who do that for a living? What do you think are the real-life perils of the job?

How are drinking, drug use, and smoking portrayed in the film? Are they glamorized? Are there realistic consequences? Why does that matter?

As female empowerment has gained traction in society, so have films that show women as smart, savvy criminals -- such as Ocean's 8 , Widows, and The Kitchen . What do you think of that trend?

Do the consequences (or lack thereof) that the women face for their criminal acts seem fair? The film questions whether the women's victims are worthy of our sympathy -- what do you think? Are they vigilantes, survivalists, or greedy criminals?

Why is it important to see diverse characters and role models in the media?

Movie Details

• In theaters : September 13, 2019
• On DVD or streaming : December 10, 2019
• Cast : Jennifer Lopez , Constance Wu , Julia Stiles
• Director : Lorene Scafaria
• Inclusion Information : Female directors, Female actors, Latino actors, Asian actors
• Studio : STX Entertainment
• Genre : Comedy
• Topics : Friendship
• Run time : 107 minutes
• MPAA rating : R
• MPAA explanation : pervasive sexual material, drug content, language and nudity
• Last updated : July 28, 2023

Did we miss something on diversity?

Research shows a connection between kids' healthy self-esteem and positive portrayals in media. That's why we've added a new "Diverse Representations" section to our reviews that will be rolling out on an ongoing basis. You can help us help kids by suggesting a diversity update.

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Review: “Hustlers” Is a Lurid Crime Story with No Edge

By Richard Brody

There’s no irony and no wink of recognition in the way the lurid tale of “Hustlers” is transformed into a feel-good one. The film, which an opening title card says is inspired by a true story (one reported in New York magazine, by Jessica Pressler) of a scam pulled off by a group of strippers, tells of money, power, sex, deceit, and crime. It’s filled with fascinating incidents and fascinating characters, whose activities, both legitimate and criminal, involve enough hungers and desires, insight and self-delusion, rises and falls, morality and amorality, to launch a fleet of tragedies, melodramas, and sardonic comedies. As written and directed by Lorene Scafaria, the movie offers enough moments of sharp emotion and keen perception to keep anticipation high throughout. Yet the movie stays on the surface, to yield, for the most part, a simplistic, unexplored celebration of characters who are molded to fit the story’s amiable tone.

“Hustlers” is told largely from the point of view of Dorothy (Constance Wu), a relatively inexperienced dancer at a strip club. The action begins in 2007, when Dorothy (her stage name is Destiny), who lives in Queens with her grandmother, starts working at a Manhattan club called Moves, where there’s money to be made from Wall Street men, who fling it around casually. There, a charismatic and canny veteran dancer named Ramona (Jennifer Lopez) takes Dorothy under her wing, mentoring her in pole-dancing and in strategizing her interactions with the club’s clients to manage their drinking and maximize their spending. As another colleague, Diamond ( Cardi B , who’s brilliant in a brief role), teaches, “Drain the clock, not the cock.”

Quickly, the movie leaps ahead to 2014, when Dorothy is being interviewed by a journalist named Elizabeth (Julia Stiles). We learn, in the course of their conversations (and in the extended flashbacks that illustrate them and provide the bulk of the movie’s action), that, after the 2008 financial crisis, the business at Moves dried up. By 2011, Dorothy has a daughter, Lily, with her boyfriend, Johnny (Gerald Earl Gillum), and, after she and Johnny break up (it’s never clear why), she needs a job and goes back to Moves, where she runs into Ramona again. It’s then that Ramona brings Dorothy in on a scheme, which she calls “fishing,” in which she and a pair of other dancers, Mercedes (Keke Palmer) and Annabelle (Lili Reinhart) lure men to Moves (never disclosing that they work there, or that they’re dancers) and ring up their big spending, of which they get a cut. When the four women’s “fishing” expeditions, too, prove unreliable, Ramona comes up with a new scheme—a blatantly illegal one. She decides to spike the men’s drinks with a blend of ketamine and MDMA, so that, in a stupor, the men will hand over their credit cards, their bank cards, their PINs , their social-security numbers, and other personal data, enabling the women to max out or clean out their accounts. But, by 2013, other women from Moves are competing at the same scam; Ramona and Dorothy pull out of the club, take their operation freelance, hire other women to work with them, and ultimately—after a moderately suspenseful cat-and-mouse game of police surveillance and a sting operation—get caught.

With their routines of seduction, their chatting and their luring, Ramona, Dorothy, and their other colleagues, are, in effect, expert actresses performing offstage. Strangely, rather than luxuriating in the verbal ingenuity and perceptive ploys with which the women pursue clients, Scafaria merely states that they do so, as in a scene of Dorothy’s first talk with Ramona, who explains her success with a shrug: she’s a “people person,” she says. At other moments, the director waves off the women’s extraordinary performances with their clients by way of mere hints. A montage shows one man entering a luxury car and another exiting it from the other side, with no detail of what’s happened inside. In another illustrative montage, one or another of the women in Ramona and Dorothy’s circle chats men up with opening lines that, unfortunately, mark the end of each scene rather than the beginning.

“Hustlers” reminds viewers, again and again, that these women are good at what they do. It lets them tell one another as much, and it shows them reaping the profits (sometimes modest, sometimes lavish) from their talents. But it is hardly interested in the turns of mind, the character traits, the figures of style that go into their complex and difficult nightly labors. For instance, early in the film, Ramona expounds, for Dorothy’s benefit, her taxonomy of the club’s three kinds of Wall Street clients: the lowest level of broker, she notes, is easily manipulated, and one of them, a man named Chuck, has been paying for her Manhattan apartment, though she has never even “sniffed his dick.” This in itself is an amazing story; the relationship between Ramona and Chuck, which takes place apparently outside the club—but on which such a crucial part of her life, and even of her livelihood, depends—could be a movie in itself. Instead, their dynamic is never seen at all.

Dorothy gets similarly, if less decisively, involved with a man named Steven (Devin Ratray), who, from an early conversation at the club, suddenly provides her with a computer, which is more or less their sole and brief subject of conversation. (The movie cuts from that chat to her suddenly using the computer, out of nowhere, on her dressing-room table.) The continuities and discontinuities between the performances onstage, in back rooms, and even at home—because, it’s pretty clear, the women in the film literally have to take their work home with them—are left out of the story completely, along with the psychological aspects of sexuality that are inseparable from those performances.

The movie’s interview format is an inspired framework with vast dramatic potential, and, at first, it seems to build multiple layers of tension into the story: whether Dorothy’s account meshes with what actually happened, whether what Dorothy tells Elizabeth meshes with what she herself knows, and whether the story Dorothy tells is different from the one that Elizabeth tries to elicit. It’s “a story about control,” Janet Jackson says, in a song that opens the film. Yet any differences between Dorothy’s memories and her interview account never play into the drama; her inner life never comes into the movie. Just how closely the action follows her account is displayed when Dorothy reaches across the table and shuts Elizabeth’s recorder—and the movie goes silent for the rest of the scene. Instead, Scafaria sets up several strong thematic tentpoles—especially an emphasis on the fraudulence, even criminality, of the financial businesses that fund the men who pay for the dancers’ services, and the dancers’ self-justifying view of the desperate measures that they take (as if in compensation for the Wall Streeters’ predatory practices). The very nature of the women’s own criminal enterprise, meanwhile, is kept prudently offscreen. For instance, it’s pretty clear that part of their operation is, in effect, a prostitution ring; it’s suggested that some of the women whom they hire are providing sexual services, away from the club, to the men they’re scamming. How they divide the money, the relationships of bosses to employees that link Dorothy and Ramona to other women whom they bring in on the scheme, how they end up taking a cut or doling out a share of the take to these other women—in effect, playing, on their own terms, the roles of their employers at Moves—isn’t depicted in the movie at all. As for the ethics of drugging and robbing men, Ramona is portrayed, according to Dorothy’s description of her in an interview, as unprincipled and reckless, whereas Dorothy expresses concern for the victims—she wants to be choosy about the targets and careful with the dosing.

“Hustlers” is full of fierce but facile critiques of modern American capitalism, yet it spends much time and energy celebrating high-end shopping and indulgence in luxury goods. (One of the best moments in the movie comes during a visit to a fancy store: under Ramona’s tutelage, Dorothy is now making good money, and she buys herself a fancy handbag, which she pays for by counting out a large stack of singles, as a snooty salesclerk looks on sniffily—until Ramona calls her out.) The crucial bond of the two women, and of their relationships with the other women in their circle, is their delight in luxury items: the employer-employee relationship and the partnership are sealed with Louboutin shoes, a chinchilla coat, a handbag. The festivity of shopping and the delight in its fruits unfortunately take the place of more thoughtful, deeply rooted, and crucial traits of character.

Even the relationship that provides Dorothy’s main motive to earn money—her relationship with her grandmother, Nan (Wai Ching Ho)—is left utterly empty. The elderly woman is portrayed as a stereotypically passive and genial elder, until, briefly, at a party chez Ramona, she lets fly with a flash of wry reminiscence (Dorothy seems neither interested nor surprised nor even involved). Likewise, the relationship between Dorothy and Ramona—the one on which the narrative depends—remains unexplored. Moreover, it’s never clear what motivates Dorothy to talk with the journalist in the first place. During one fine moment, Dorothy challenges Elizabeth’s ability to understand her, on the grounds of their socioeconomic differences: she asks Elizabeth whether she came from a wealthy family (Elizabeth answers no), what her parents did (father, a journalist; mother, a psychiatrist), where she went to school (Brown). Yet here, too, the matter is vaguely and quickly dispatched.

This shallow and rushed approach has consequences for the film’s performances. Lopez brings energy, determination, and sheer charisma to the role of Ramona. But, because the movie is told through Dorothy’s narration (by way of the interview with Elizabeth), Lopez’s lead role is, in effect, turned into a supporting one. Lopez doesn’t so much build a character as inhabit, with strength and flair, one that’s ready-made; her sense of presence is extraordinary, but it’s not given much scope by the narrowly defined role or the choppy, hasty camera style. By contrast, the script and the direction don’t do Wu any favors: with the movie set up around her reminiscences, much of her time onscreen is spent embodying a mere information-delivery mechanism, one that evades the psychology of Dorothy’s perspective and of her role as the story’s central consciousness, Wu plays the nominal lead role, but Scafaria gives her little of the dramatic material implicit in that role to work with; as a result, Dorothy remains undefined, the cipher at the center of a feel-good story of friendship, family, and shopping.

A previous version of this post misattributed a line of dialogue in the opening voice-over.

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In Hustlers , Jennifer Lopez Proves the Power of the Movie Star

In 1962, on the set of the beleaguered production of writer-director Joseph Mankiewicz’s Cleopatra , Elizabeth Taylor gave Richard Burton a lesson on the power of a camera-lit star . As Sam Kashner and Nancy Schoenberger write in Furious Love , Burton was initially confused by what he perceived to be Taylor’s lack of technique. “She’s just not doing anything,” he complained to Mankiewicz of their scenes together. So the director took Burton aside and showed him what Taylor looked like onscreen. “It took his breath away,” the authors write. “Burton — trained to move, to speak, to act — was struck by Elizabeth’s absolute stillness .” Burton would later claim that he gleaned a lifelong skill from his time with Elizabeth: how to calmly acquiesce to the “camera’s cool eye.”

In Lorene Scafaria’s glittering crime spectacle Hustlers , Jennifer Lopez barely needs to move before the camera’s cool eye to pull our attention toward her. Consider her reintroduction onscreen, after she’s just finished pole dancing to Fiona Apple’s “Criminal.” She’s festooned by a magnificent fur coat, wearing towering Lucite platform heels and a silver-tasseled number that highlights her immense beauty and fine musculature. She’s on a roof, carefully smoking a cigarette, the city around her drenched in darkness. Lopez barely moves in this scene, but she doesn’t have to. The confidence she possesses is undeniable, in the posture of her body and the jut of her chin. Destiny (Constance Wu) recognizes this immediately. She stumbles onto that rooftop and into a deep friendship that will alter the course of her life in ways she’s still trying to understand by the end of the film. Lopez is a goddess and a general, a woman in full control of her body and the story it tells. And the body never lies. It’s this fearsome, layered, magnetic performance that Hustlers orbits.

Hustlers , which is based on a New York Magazine article , is ostensibly about a group of 2007–2008–era strippers , led by a woman named Ramona (Lopez), who begin drugging men with deep pockets after the financial crisis, maxing out their cards at the club and taking a cut for themselves. It’s a raucous, glitter-coated treatise on the pulverizing nature of capitalism, stuffed inside a rich period piece whose soundtrack and costuming work in concert to create a bracing time capsule. The strippers’ red-light-decked escapades are intercut with the individual story of Destiny, revealed through a series of prickly interactions with a journalist, Elizabeth (Julia Stiles, portraying New York ’s Jessica Pressler), who’s interested in the scheme she hatched with Ramona. The strength of the film is in how it charts the fierce, complex, emotional relationship between these two women, as they alternately hustle to provide for their families and enjoy the luxury that the Wall Street suits they dance for take for granted.

Hustlers ’ profound vision of female friendship — physically intimate, occasionally uproarious, and always tangled up in power imbalances — dazzles in part because of the movie’s casting. I was especially mesmerized by the small turns by Lili Reinhart as Annabelle, a stripper estranged from her family who tends to vomit under emotional duress, and Cardi B, whose signature cackle was made to be documented on film. Constance Wu brings a wounded, yearning quality to Destiny, apparent even before we learn of her mother’s abandonment, casting in sharp relief why she’s so drawn to Ramona. Beyond the cast, Scafaria proves to be an immensely intelligent writer-director, who never looks down on her characters, allowing them to be rough-hewn anti-heroes rather than bland paragons of empowerment. Scafaria wisely revels in the hard-edged nature of women, allowing them to be angry, untrusting, vindictive, loving, and glamorous, all at the same time. In essence, they have humanity.

Much can be said about the aesthetic delights of the film, too. The film deftly glides through time, owing to editor Kayla Emter, who balances the emotional, criminal, and cultural threads of the film. Mitchell Travers’s wardrobe design is some of the best I’ve seen this year; the second-skin tight dresses, silver thigh-high boots, chinchilla coats, and Juicy Couture hoodies feel totemic. The sound design and music supervision are stealthily beguiling. At one point, Destiny abruptly turns off Elizabeth’s recording device, ending the interview and plunging the film into silence. It’s a cunning choice.

But days later, I keep coming back to Jennifer Lopez’s performance. With a wave of her hand or a dip in her hips, light seems to change and move with her. Lopez has always been charming — even great — in films like Out of Sight (1998). But here she’s doing the best work of her career, weaponizing an undeniable charisma and turning it into something hard, pointed, righteous, even angry. The way she trains her Kohl-rimmed eyes on a mark is thrilling and frightening. The way she walks into a room — and the film gives us ample opportunity to study her strut in fur, into a bar, toward a salivating man, sometimes in slow motion — communicates such self-possession and raw grace that I found myself craning closer to the screen, as if I could identify the source of such power and adopt it myself. There’s a moment late in the film when we only see Lopez’s back to the camera, dressed in that Juicy Couture hoodie and leather leggings. Scafaria’s camera holds onto this image. We can’t see Lopez’s face, but her still back paints a picture of confidence, hard work, desire. It’s a fleeting moment but one that stopped me cold, in awe of the story her body had to tell.

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10 Harsh Realities About The Divergent Books, 11 Years After The Series Ended

10 seminal western movies that defined the genre, inside out 2’s new emotions create a major problem for the first movie, bolstered by rich character drama and stunning star performances, hustlers delivers electrifying and empowering entertainment through the female gaze..

Hollywood has released plenty of movies based on true stories that went on to become awards season favorites, and the industry has taken a look at sex workers in various fiction and documentary films; rarely - if ever - have these two kinds of movie crossed paths. But that's exactly what Lorene Scafaria's Hustlers is, a cross section of grounded real life drama with a mythologizing depiction of the strippers-turned-scammers who drugged rich men to take their money. Hustlers  adapts the Robin Hood-style story "The Hustlers at Scores" written by Jessica Pressler and published by New York Magazine in 2015 about the real women who become more fictionalized in Scafaria's film. Bolstered by rich character drama and stunning star performances, Hustlers delivers electrifying and empowering entertainment through the female gaze.

Hustlers follows Destiny (Constance Wu), a stripper trying to support her grandmother who becomes friends with a veteran at her club, Ramona (Jennifer Lopez). Ramona teaches Destiny the ins and outs of how to make the most money by differentiating between the Wall Street types who come in. However, when the financial crisis of 2008 hits and Destiny has a baby, she loses touch with Ramona. When they reunite years later, Destiny joins Ramona's group of girls who help reel in clients for the strip club. Along with Mercedes (Keke Palmer) and Annabelle (Lili Reinhart), Destiny and Ramona build an empire of their own by drugging men they perceive to be rich and maxing out their credit cards. However, as Ramona grows more reckless and Destiny more wary of the operation, it's unclear how long they can go without being caught - and what will become of their friendship when the dust settles.

Scafaria ( Seeking a Friend for the End of the World ) wrote and directed Hustlers , and she excels in telling a story about sex workers that never once objectifies or degrades them. Certainly, there's plenty of female nudity and sexual situations in Hustlers , but the women are not positioned as something to be ogled, their nudity and how they wield their sexuality is simply part of their job. And that distinction between object and person, especially in a story about strippers, is key to Hustlers ' success. In the hands of another writer-director, Hustlers could've easily been a lesser movie with little insight into what makes these characters tick. But Scafaria's script is more focused on the multifaceted people who created this Robin Hood scam, and that story includes just as much platonic female friendship as sex. However, while much of Hustlers ' success as a film comes down to the female gaze, it would do Scafaria a disservice to imply any woman could've done what she did. Scafaria's script is whip smart, playing with form in a way we rarely see in films based on true stories, and her direction makes  Hustlers  an absolutely gorgeous movie to watch.

Just as important as Scafaria's contributions to Hustlers are stars Lopez and Wu, whose dazzling performances bring the complicated women of Ramona and Destiny to life. Their friendship, and all the messy emotions that come along with it due to their operation, forms the emotional core of Hustlers . And with such talented actors as Lopez and Wu at the center, Ramona and Destiny's friendship is devastatingly compelling, lending real heart to Hustlers . That wouldn't be possible if not for Lopez and Wu. For her part, Lopez turns in the kind of deftly nuanced performance that should put her in awards contention, while Wu is similarly strong as Hustlers ' de facto protagonist. Further,  Hustlers sells itself on its considerably talented cast of female performers - including Cardi B and Lizzo - and there are plenty of moments in which the other female stars shine, including Palmer and Reinhart. But Hustlers is Lopez and Wu's movie and they're undeniable powerhouses in the lead roles.

As is the case of many true story adaptations, there are moments when the pacing of Hustlers lags, and Scafaria's script struggles to keep the momentum of the story going when the real life tale itself slows down. For the most part, though, Scafaria and Hustlers are able to overcome these brief stumbling moments by zipping quickly through key, if uninteresting events (like Destiny's relationship with her daughter's father). Ultimately, it all serves the main story and characters of Hustlers , coming together to form an excellently crafted and acted movie. It's such a unique spin on an age-old premise (strippers as modern day Robin Hood) that there's an easy entry point for most any viewer. And Hustlers fulfills on its premise, providing escapist glamor and revenge in its heist story, while offering a more captivating experience as the film dives deep into its characters, particularly the friendship between Ramona and Destiny.

As such, Hustlers is an enjoyable movie experience and definitely worth checking out, even for those who may not have been intrigued by the trailers, which don't do the film justice (likely because it's such a mix of genres and so atypical, it's tough to sell as only one kind of movie). Though Hustlers may not be a typical true story drama, no doubt taking some liberties for the sake of entertainment, it should be in awards season contention - not only for Scafaria's work on the script and as director, but for Lopez's exceptional performance. Hustlers may reel viewers in with its promise of fun heist capers (which it totally delivers, along with more humor than audiences may expect), but they'll stay for the truly riveting drama and honest heart at the center of this scammer story.

Hustlers  is now playing in U.S. theaters. It is 109 minutes long and rated R for pervasive sexual material, drug content, language and nudity.

Let us know what you thought of the film in the comments section!

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Hustlers Review

13 Sep 2019

Whether you’re a fan of her films or not, it’s undeniable that no-one commands a room quite like Jennifer Lopez . That self-made magnetism that has been finessed over years of performing still has the ability to seemingly slow down time, and writer-director Lorene Scafaria appreciates this more than anyone, rewarding such enigmatic energy with the role of a lifetime.

Make no mistake that Crazy Rich Asians heroine Constance Wu gets top billing for Hustlers — a con movie with all the slickness of a Steven Soderbergh thriller — and rightfully so as its pure-hearted protagonist. Yet from the moment Ramona straddles her pole under a waterfall of paper bills, it’s Lopez whose legacy is cemented in this film.

“Doesn’t money make you horny?” she coos afterwards to a stunned Destiny, cradling her earnings like a newborn. For the women working at Moves strip club, money is a shortcut to freedom at the expense of a society designed to hold them down. In the New York article that inspired Hustlers , journalist Jessica Pressler frames the women in a Robin Hood context, drugging and robbing Wall Street one creep at a time to afford a better life for themselves and their families at a time of financial disarray.

Scafaria chooses to celebrate what makes women different over dwelling on what holds them back.

This modern band of merry men each come with their own calling card in the film, be it Cardi B’s signature cackle or Lizzo’s white pillowy pimp hat. Even Riverdale ’s Lili Reinhart — who takes the hit as the quiet one so the bigger characters can thrive — turns in one of the best vomit scenes of the year, while Wu pairs her signature sweetness with a sharp entrepreneurial streak.

Their collective moxie is thrilling, and stoked by Ramona’s prowess allows them to run circles around their clientele, a rare, somewhat rewarding sight to behold until the moral scale is upended and the group’s dynamic rapidly unravels.  Hustlers is also pleasingly aesthetically assured, switching from travelling, Birdman -like takes to crisp, fast cuts, all captured with a nocturnal neon tinge by cinematographer Todd Banhazl (who worked magic on Janelle Monáe ’s visual album Dirty Computer ).

Where Scafaria finds her strongest footing in a genre defined by the cutthroat dialogue of Soderbergh or even Scorsese , is in the welcome camaraderie conjured up between the film’s big narrative punches. There’s a joyful rhythm to the girls squabbling over chicken wings, or giggling through a drug-cooking montage that would make Walter White blush.

In giving her heist movie a heart without sacrificing the high-tension tropes of the genre, Scafaria chooses to celebrate what makes women different over dwelling on what holds them back. It’s the women in this film that summon its sparky, scrappy edge, who implore you to stick with them through the murkiest of times. And you’ll find yourself doing just that, time and time again.

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Critics Are Already Calling Hustlers the Movie of the Year

By Halie LeSavage

If Hustlers arrived in theaters to lukewarm reviews, I'd probably still see it. After all, it's based on a true story that's inherently cinematic: A tale of New York City strippers who swindle Wall Street men out of their money after falling on hard times in the 2008 recession. On top of that, it features powerful leading women including Jennifer Lopez, Constance Wu, Cardi B, Lizzo, and Lili Reinhart.

Early reviews are putting any doubts about the movie's merits to rest. Critics don't think Hustlers is merely "good"—they think it's already an Oscars contender. Hustlers premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival to rapturous reviews. Over on Twitter, #Hustlers was trending on Sunday, September 8, with hundreds of resoundingly positive comments. Ahead of its wide release in theaters, it has a 92% approval rating on the review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes .

Much of the praise for Hustlers is dedicated to Jennifer Lopez, who fronts the film as the ringleader Ramona. In fact, some reviewers say she could be in the running for her first Academy Award. Frankly, it's thrilling to see a criminally underrated performer get her due from prestige film outlets. (Super Bowl planners, I hope you'll finally give her that rumored half-time show after this.)

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Early reviews suggest that Hustlers expertly examines the nuances of stripping as a profession. The women in the film aren't one-dimensional objects dancing for patrons at a club: They're entrepreneurs, parents, friends, and fully-realized women trying to make the most of their line of work. Much of that distinction was made possible by director Lorene Scarfaria, who adapted the film's script from the New York story it's based off of and hired consultants to advise on the film.

Hustlers wasn't made in a vacuum; it's the latest movie in a string of standout projects that are led and performed by women. And we need more women-led success stories like it in Hollywood. Women account for 51% of moviegoers, yet they're 4% of directors and 15% of writers in the entire industry. In a world where some studios hold onto the belief that women can't lead critical darlings or box office successes, it's thrilling to see critics lending their support to a movie without a single leading man.

Put all of those factors together, and you've got a recipe for what some are calling the best movie of the year. Here's what critics have said so far about Hustlers .

VanityFair : " Hustlers is a movie about work, and women, and economy, neither forgiving of its protagonists’ crimes nor those of the people they preyed upon. It’s a bright stiletto stab toward equity, and in the process one of the best movies about American money in recent memory."

By Fiona Embleton

By Sam Reed

By Elizabeth Logan

The Hollywood Reporter : " Hustlers delivers on its hype while consistently doing the unexpected. Although the women of Hustlers are clearly stepping over a very thin, dark line between working the system and criminal behavior, you can’t help but root for them and all women who are tired of struggling financially and decide to use what they know to get ahead. It’s a classic underdog story about the kind of Americans people don’t often think of as self-made."

The Guardian : "There are so many immediate pleasures and vicarious thrills to be had in Hustlers , a giddy, gaudy blast of a movie. [Jennifer Lopez is] the shining neon star of Hustlers , a shrewd, deliciously entertaining pop culture caper that kicks off the new season with a splash. Bring some dollar bills, because they deserve them."

IndieWire : "[ Hustlers is] funny, empowering, sexy, emotional, and a bit scary, with most of those superlatives coming care of a full-force performance from Jennifer Lopez genuinely deserving of awards consideration."

Entertainment Weekly : "Lopez (who seems to hold the center of every scene she’s in) and Wu bring a soulfulness and desperation to their roles that defy easy profiling. The room Hustlers leaves for that humanity — and the draw of Lopez’s magnetic presence — gives the movie more than legs; beneath all the chinchilla and body glitter, there’s a smart, beating heart."

USA Today : " Hustlers is empathetic and understanding in the way it looks at sex workers as also single moms and women just trying to get by in a world where the rich seemingly only get richer. It also works as an enjoyable, empowering extravaganza of physical humor, clever scriptwriting, exquisite fashion and scantily clad underdogs."

Mashable : "Guaranteed to be one of the best times you'll have at the movies this year, this is the Girl's Trip of 2019, and it's best experienced in a theater. It took all of 20 minutes for my crowd, a small group of media and industry professionals, to drop all pretenses of professionalism and erupt in celebratory screams of unadulterated joy."

Variety : "Ever since I saw Hustlers at an early screening, I can’t stop raving about it. Every Oscars season, there’s a movie that sneaks up on the pundits. And I have a feeling that this dramatic comedy written and directed by Lorene Scafaria will be a box office hit and critical darling.[...] If there’s any justice, Jennifer Lopez will receive her first Oscar nomination for channeling the ringleader Ramona as Erin Brockovich by way of Matthew McConaughey in Magic Mike ."

Hustlers hits theaters everywhere on Friday, September 13 .

By Christopher Rosa

By Krystin Arneson

Den of Geek

Clipped Review: FX Series Dramatizes an Unbelievable Sports Scandal

FX's miniseries about Donald Sterling's scandalous tenure owning the Los Angeles Clippers should intrigue even non-sports fans.

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This Clipped review contains no spoilers.

While many might still say HBO is the best American network for prestige television, FX has forcefully inserted itself into the conversation in the last few years. From the rabid animal that is The Bear to the densely historical Shōgun , the channel commands respect just by placing its name in front of a series (which is a necessary branding tactic since many of those series, Clipped included, stream exclusively on Hulu and not cable). Knowing how incredible FX’s track record in the 2020s is, it came as a pleasant surprise when it was announced the network would be adapting a recollection of Los Angeles Clippers basketball owner Donald Sterling’s racist downfall at the end of the 2014 NBA season. 

Using extensive research and journalistic fortitude from ESPN reporter Ramona Shelburne, Clipped takes the already wild story of Sterling’s banishment from professional basketball and sensationalizes certain aspects of the saga for a wider audience. Both basketball fans who can quote the events verbatim and non-sports folks who want a juicy tabloid drama will be intrigued by the miniseries’ style and substance. 

To give some context to the proceedings, let’s give a rundown of the messy divorce between owner and franchise in a nutshell. The Los Angeles Clippers were one of the worst teams in the NBA for Donald Sterling’s entire three-plus decades at the helm of the organization. With a crass arrogance and nonchalance added to his closed-tight checkbook, Sterling ran L.A’s other basketball team like a petulant toddler. He also appeared to regard his majority-Black players like property and took advantage of his wife like a pet. 

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All of these atrocious qualities set Sterling up for a climactic downfall, which is set in motion by a mysterious mistress dubbed V. Stiviano (she was born Maria Vanessa Perez ). These two characters form the entertaining backbone of Clipped , and this is where the action begins in episode one. Played to perfection by Ed O’Neill, Sterling is perverted, vile, and ironically hilarious. Basketball fans already know that predicting what would come out of Sterling’s mouth was a lottery of phrases, but the miniseries casting directors brilliantly understand that the old bigot needed to be portrayed by an actor who was familiar with uncouth dialogue delivery. 

Leveraging his days on Married… with Children , O’Neill never misses a beat playing Sterling. From a cringe-worthy scene asking superstar point guard Chris Paul (Alphonse Nicholson) to sing “Happy Birthday” to the way he cradles power forward Blake Griffin’s (Austin Scott) face in his hands, O’Neill eerily recreates every last mannerism and creepy quirk that Sterling possessed in real life. His Emmy-worthy performance proves that some of Hollywood’s best talent remains our cherished childhood sitcom actors. 

Sterling’s girlfriend, V. Stiviano (Cleopatra Coleman), gets plenty to do as well. An ambiguous woman who recorded Sterling’s frequent rants and rambles just in case anything useful became tangible, Stiviano is the character most casual fans will become fascinated with. The show carefully carves out her motivations for taking advantage of Sterling, both financially and in his ruination, and Coleman is a revelation in the process. She combines real life inspiration and creative liberties to give Stiviano a more well-rounded personality than basketball fans were ever able to get from the often-masked woman during the actual chronicle. 

Clipped also gives plenty of screentime to the legendary Laurence Fishburne as Clippers’ coach Doc Rivers. Besides not really looking like Rivers, something that is more than a little distracting as a longtime NBA fan, Rivers’ perspective feels a little inconsequential in the scheme of the story. The pressure to win a championship against the backdrop of Sterling’s immorality won’t really connect with non-basketball fans. This audience might see Rivers’ story as an intrusive aside from the main plot line surrounding Sterling and Stiviano, while basketball diehards will already know everything about Doc’s part in the journey. This puts Clipped in a tough spot where the writers don’t know whether to cater more to the folks in the know or those learning about this history for the first time. 

The jumping between the different characters causes some uneven pacing, but the artistic expression on display makes up for this. It’s obvious that the miniseries understands every intricacy of what happened a decade ago, but this small time frame makes the series feel maybe a little too early to re-enter the pop culture zeitgeist. Sterling’s banishment made headlines outside the sports world, and even Gen Z will remember at least hearing about it in passing. Social media was still in a semi-primitive state in 2014 compared to now, but Sterling’s racist rant went viral in a way that transcended the technology of the time. 

Is it really necessary to make a TV series about nonfictional events that are still so fresh in the viewers’ minds? This question hangs over the show far too often. It doesn’t affect the quality of what’s on the screen, but it does spoil the entertainment that often defines other historical dramas. Clipped is a very good FX affair that was probably born a little too early (although O’Neill may not have been cast a decade from now, something that would change the entire dynamic of the depiction.) Those with absolutely no prior knowledge of what happened will enjoy it the most, but then they might not be as emotionally invested as basketball fans educated on the matter. Clipped’s juxtaposition of watching motivations will be the legacy of the program.

The first two episodes of Clipped are available to stream on Hulu now. New episodes premiere Tuesdays, culminating with the finale on July 2.

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Shawn is a University of Washington graduate in English Language and Literature. He has been a freelance writer for SUPERJUMP, FanFare, and An Injustice! Mag. He…